Liberals spent nearly $300M on the new passport, and earmarked nearly $5M on sole sourced contracts for David Johnston’s “Special Rapporteur” role
Money well spent? You be the judge.
It’s Parliament’s first day back after summer, and that means that responses to Order Paper Questions filed in June were tabled. There were highly two newsworthy items in my stack.
1.) The $hitty new passport cost nearly $300M
Weeks after Canada’s new passport was discovered to be -putting it mildly - less than durable, a response to an Order Paper Question I received moments ago shows that the Liberal government spent nearly $300M on its design and printing.
The Order Paper Question outlines the following:
“(a) The newly unveiled Canadian passport was delivered as part of a comprehensive project led by IRCC to replace the passport booklet and all related production printing equipment and infrastructure to produce this new passport. The Treasury Board of Canada has approved a project budget of $161M for this project which began in 2016, which includes costs payable to the Canadian Bank Note Company (CBN) for various project deliverables.”
And
“(b) As part of the project, Canada launched a competitive procurement process in June 2016, and on May 24, 2019, a contract was awarded to the CBN to deliver this solution for the Government of Canada. CBN was responsible per the contract for the development of the designs for the new passport following the decision on theme by the Minister of IRC. The contract was awarded for $284M, as posted on Buy and Sell, for printed matter, including books, newspapers, pictures, manuscripts and forms.”
If I read this right, the $hitty passport actually came in nearly $100M over budget, and took nearly seven years for the Liberal government to release. Yikes.
Is the new passport worth nearly $300M? Particularly after the Toronto Sun reported that the chronic delays Canadians faced for passport processing were “due to mismanagement,” I’ll leave you, dear reader, to be the judge of that.
2.) The Liberals allocated nearly $5M on sole-sourced contracts related to David Johnston’s Special Rapporteur role
Another Order Paper Question revealed that after avoiding calling a public inquiry into election interference by appointing former Governor General David Johnston into the position, which he subsequently resigned from, the Liberals allocated nearly $5M on expenses related to his role.
The allocated value of the contracts to Tory’s LLP, which included a contract with Navigator Ltd, and RKESTRA Communications Corporation, totaled nearly $5M.
It’s worth noting that these contracts were sole-sourced, which should raise eyebrows given questions regarding the connections of some players to the Liberal Party. Also of note is that the contracts included things like advice on “tone”. As I wrote earlier this year, instead of hiring these fixers, David Johnston probably should have resigned earlier.
Given that these expenses aided in the Liberal government’s delay of a much-needed public inquiry into foreign interference, the need to release just how far shy of paying out the total value of these contracts they came. Based on their track record, I suspect it will be nearly 100%. The weasel words used in this Order Paper Question shouldn’t be allowed to carry - you deserve to know how much they spent on Johnson’s “Special Rapporteur” debacle.
More to come……..